1. Precious

A blunt and brutal matter-of-fact film about an obese Harlem teenager who's suffered years of grotesque abuse, sexual from her father and emotional from her jealous mother. What hope it has is hard-won—and remarkable, given the world it describes.

2. Katyn

Andrzej Wajda's brooding delineation of the 1940 Soviet slaughter of thousands of Polish officers and other "undesirables." (The aging filmmaker's own father was among the slain.) In the aftermath, Communists and Fascists, both loathsome, wrestle over history, accusing one another while bystanders mourn and dissenters die.

3. Gomorrah

A wrenching, dazzling, merciless account of mob life in contemporary Naples. Probably the most grimly honest mob movie ever made.

4. Up in the Air

Young writer-director Jason Reitman (Juno) wryly treats the banalities of what we Americans these days deem success and intimacy. A funny and mature film with a sober but bracing ending.

5. The Hurt Locker

The Iraq war with gritty immediacy in its focus on a three-man squad of bomb defusers. Director Kathryn Bigelow hauls the audience into the sweat, light, terror, and death of what has been for many Americans a remote, even abstract war.

Roy Anker is professor of English at Calvin College. He is the author of Catching Light: Looking for God in the Movies (Eerdmans).